Mossy Cottage Knits

California or Bust: Day .5 and Day 1

(Monday, 4/10/06: Work exploded when I arrived in the office today, Dear Readers, so, really, as it says at the bottom of this post from last week, I won't be posting again until Wednesday, no matter how many bribes of chocolate come my way and no matter how much I would prefer to be writing about The Wedding of the Year than to be wrestling with new Web development software that inexplicably forces you to save a file that you're not ready to save yet, and is using fonts in a way heretofore unknown to humankind.)

(Picture-heavy post, Dear Readers!)

Who knew that when you take a vacuum-packed bag of Fritos 36,000 feet into the air, the bag will become distended like a balloon and, despite how tentatively and hesitantly you pick at the heat-sealed edges, threaten to shower all the passengers in a 360-degree circle around you with corn chips? The young man sitting next to us, who, when he is not flying from Point A to Point B on Alaska Air, works for Horizon Air in some capacity, assured us that that was normal in-air Frito behavior. We were not convinced.

That was the best and the worst of the flight home, if you don’t count some stomach-turning turbulence. The flight down, on the other hand, was “eh.” We’re still trying to figure out how it was that the pilot announced, “Flight attendants prepare for departure,” and then the back end of the plane opened up and the caterers started loading in the food. What the…?! That, and after we had circled endlessly over San Jose Airport, the pilot played an unnerving game of eenie-meenie-miney-mo with the runways, finally picking one by, we think, playing “rock, paper, scissors” with the co-pilot. Silly me; I thought there was more of a system to it than that.

Our car-rental company tried to play footloose and fancy free with us uh-gain (remember how, when we went to Arizona, we reserved a Mustang but ended up with a dorkmobile?) but we prevailed and were upgraded to a zippy, copper-colored mini-SUV—well, maybe more a glorified station wagon—that we grew so attached to that, by the end of the trip, we had named it "Joaquín Miller" and were loathe to say good-bye. (The “Joaquín Miller” will be explained in due time.)

The day improved vastly when we went to CommuKnity that afternoon for the first of many Surreal Meet-Ups with Complete Strangers Who Share My Love of Knitting—a get-together with Nathania! I don’t know why I’m surprised when people look exactly like the photographs on their blogs—what do I think cameras do, exactly?—but Nathania looked just the way I expected her to, beautiful, beautifully coiffed, feminine, and sophisticated, and was warm and hospitable and gave us heartfelt, enveloping hugs and made us feel right at home. Plus—bonus!—we got to meet her two beautiful daughters; the owner of the shop; and a customer—apparently a regular at the store—who does canine search and rescue, including the sites of the Oklahoma bombing and 9/11. I was completely overawed to be in the presence of her and her newest doggie-hero-in-training. I would have spent hours standing worshipfully in her shadow, mooning at her, if I hadn't been lured away by the yarn.

(Let the record show that I left the store with four skeins of Kureyon because TMK insisted that I buy more yarn. Insisted. I tried not to go overboard on my travel-knitting and packed one ball of yarn and one pattern for one project. I was comfortable with this arrangement but TMK worked herself up into quite the lather and said I didn't have enough yarn and I had to buy more. All of this is true, Scout's honor.)

Poor Nathania was involved in a fight to the death with a cash register possessed by debit-system poltergeists, so we didn’t get to spend much time chatting—although she and I did get in a few minutes of very girly "what are you going to wear to the wedding?" nitter-natter—but finally being in the same state, in the same room, at the same time was enough for the nonce. Besides, we knew our paths would cross again at the wedding.

The first full day in San Jose we went to the Winchester Mystery House. Initially I was underwhelmed by the idea…but I should have learned my lesson when I was underwhelmed by the idea of seeing the Grand Canyon—and finished the day foaming at the mouth and declaring fervently that I had seen the face of God. By the end of the tour of the house, while I had not exactly seen the face of God, I had been consumed by the ghostly presence of a woman who was rich, brilliant, ahead of her time, and completely, utterly and inarguably wacko. And I found myself completely spooked by and yet in love with the house. I mean, fer Cripes' sake, one of the rooms had a full-sized window in the floor! It didn’t help that I am a huge, slavering fan of anything Tiffany, and the house is littered, littered with Tiffany windows and doors—including, be still my heart, a higgledy-piggledy pile of unused, surplus Tiffany original windows and doors that have been sitting in a storage room since the moment construction on the house stopped. Oh, to have a surplus pile of Tiffany windows and doors.

(A side note to you techies out there who might care about this sort of thing: The Winchester Mystery House is monstrously huge, obviously, and has 160 rooms totaling 22,000 square feet. Bill Gates’s house, which is but a few miles from where I sit, is more than twice that in size, 55,000 square feet. Oof. Or, as Frankie would say, "Mrrf.")

Some pictures of the house:

The outside (this picture shows maybe a fifth of the house):

The surplus Tiffany windows and doors. Be still my heart.

A Tiffany window which cost only $1,500 to purchase and install when the house was built:

Some of the many "daisy" windows:

Spiderweb windows:

Some of the damage inflicted by the 1906 earthquake. Mrs. Winchester interpreted this event as a message from spirits that she was spending too much money on the front of the house and immediately boarded up the front 30 rooms, never to open them again in her lifetime. See? Wacko.

The only damage inflicted by the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, the dislodging of a few bricks at the base of a chimney:

A view from one of the windows:

A half-horse, half-dragon fountain:

The conservatory roofs:

The famous "door to nowhere" (look in the middle of the picture):

A beautiful double pink camellia in the garden:

Wednesday's posting: The Wedding of the Year!

Posted by Ryan at April 7, 2006 02:50 PM